[Intro] [Verse 1] The legend lives on from the launchpads of old, of a ship that would touch the sun's fire The Icarus Dawn, with a hull triple-bold, and a crew that could pull the stars nigher With a payload of hope and a drive-plume so bright, she was bound for the great heliopause A ghost on the solar wind, chasing the light, defying the pull of old laws She was queen of the fleet and the pride of the age, the best of the interstellar line And the company men turned a confident page, as she plotted her perfect design. [Chorus] Did the ground crew all know, when they sealed up the bay, of the tremor in the drive-plume's hum? Did they feel a cold ghost on that hot launch-day, for the silence that was yet to come? The ship was a promise, a star-faring dream, a bone to be chewed by the void When the deep-space maneuver went wide of the beam, and the laws of the heavens destroyed. [Verse 2] She made her apogee burn, a whisper of grace, a hundred-ton bird in the black Then turned her broad belly to cold, empty space, on a course there'd be no turning back The comms were all clear and the captain was calm, as he checked on the ship's vital signs He read out the numbers, a technical psalm, to a world held by thin, hopeful lines The ship was a good one, the captain well-seasoned, the mission plan patched conic-true Concluding their fly-by, for all the right reasons, with a world waiting for something new. [Chorus] Did the ground crew all know, when they sealed up the bay, of the tremor in the drive-plume's hum? Did they feel a cold ghost on that hot launch-day, for the silence that was yet to come? The ship was a promise, a star-faring dream, a bone to be chewed by the void When the deep-space maneuver went wide of the beam, and the laws of the heavens destroyed. [Verse 3] The trouble came quiet, a shudder so slight, a flicker on one of the screens A pressure drop warning, a faint amber light, lost between waking and dreams The captain called down, said "We're venting somewhere, and the ship has begun to complain" The Icarus Dawn gave a groan to the air, like a beast that is feeling its chain Then the astrogator, with ice in her throat, came on deck with her face pale and drawn Said, "Tell them I love them," was all that she wrote, "and it's been good to know you, the Dawn." [Chorus] Does anyone know where the laws of Man go, when the silence turns hours to ages? The ship was a promise, a star-faring show, now a footnote on history's pages The patched conic frayed to a transient streak of a prayer that was lost in the void When the drive-plume's low tremor became a death-shriek, and the laws of the heavens destroyed. [Verse 4] They might have split open, they might have just tumbled, they may have broke deep and took night As tesseral harmonics relentlessly humbled the ship with their gravitational might She fell from her station, a graveyard orbit, a slow, silent, spiraling fall Subsumed in the darkness, bit by painful bit, beyond any hope of a call And all that remains is a signal that's dead, and the names of the daughters and sons And the words the young astrogator had said, for the twenty-and-eight vanished ones. [Outro] And the legend lives on in the data they saved, of a ship that would touch the sun's fire A rapture of scrap where the brave were engraved, a funeral pyre in the sky And the watchers below saw a new constellation, a shower of man-made star-tears A beautiful, terrible, brief coronation, that will echo for thousands of years.
